And She Was (22 page)

Light came in thin lines, as if it wasn’t sure it wanted to come at all. It shot through brief holes in the clouds. Holes that closed when they felt the heat, leaving the light to seek another opening. Five men nearly
died there by the beach. They were awaiting a MediVac to Kodiak. Two days later, one of them would die—the one Carl had beaten past unconscious on the parking lot sand. Victims were falling all around me—Kathy, Mary, Les, these five assholes.

The police were there when Marge and I drove back to the Elbow. We told our stories, largely the truth, except we couldn’t remember names and faces. I hadn’t seen Carl’s hammerlike fist hit again and again. It had been too fast, too dark. Marge was arguing with one of the cops, who wanted to go question Les at the clinic, when I left.

The rain began as I turned off the valley road onto my hill. It splattered at first, big spot drops, then came driving at me, stinging my cheeks and pelting my scalp. After cutting the engine, I had to pry my fingers off the handlebars. They were crinkled into half circles and creaked open. I trudged home, peeled off wet jeans, and climbed into my nest, listening to the rain beat its driving rhythm above me.

In the chaos, no one found the other victim that night. Later the police would say that the body had probably bobbed unseen under docks, then drifted from the harbor. Currents kept it near shore where the next high tide swept it alongside the wrecked
Dauntless
. It thumped against the rusting hull for hours before the tide changed, and in the confusing moments when the incoming tide pulls away again, it brushed along the wood and landed on the beach.

AUGUST 13, 1986

T
hree days later, someone found his body, folded around the bow point and half buried in sand. The police came, took it to Anchorage for an autopsy, asked questions. Nobody knew anything about how Nicholas had died. Mary said she’d been expecting him for several days. He’d radioed he was coming in soon, and that’s the last she’d heard. They found his boat, tied securely to the dock. All shipshape. Nothing amiss. The harbormaster said he’d come in early Friday morning and hadn’t been seen since.

I was just grateful. Mary would get her kids back. I wouldn’t have to worry about another late-night rescue. End of story. End of my responsibility. People aren’t inclined to be suspicious of good luck, and I was no exception.

The hoopla of the beatings waned and only the plod of investigation remained. August was in full swing, and the weather was as nice as it got. I found myself wanting to get out of town, away from the bar. I pulled on my
SPAWN TILL YOU DIE
T-shirt and a pair of 501s and started riding the beach road east of town. It was a half-and-half day. Big burly clouds muscled into passive blue sky, only to lose the fight and move on. The sun was betting on the blue.

I find it hard to describe this place. Bob Hope visited the Aleutians during the war days. He got close. It’s the only place on earth, he said,
where a man could “walk in mud up to his knees bucking a snowstorm that blew sand in his face, while being pelted in the rear on a sunny day.” No matter how you try to describe it, one thing is constant: the Aleutians just won’t obey ordinary rules. And this rebellion leads to extraordinary things.

As I rode that morning with eagles swooping from cliffs down to the ocean, and waves coiling along the rocks, and hard dirt gliding under my bike, I was aware of this place like I’d never been aware of a place before.

The Aleutians have been described as a necklace of islands, arching through the most desolate expanse of ocean on the planet. They are wind and fog and volcanoes and tidal waves.

The cold Bering Sea pounds from the north; the warm Pacific swirls from the south. The Aleutians are the breakers between. If it weren’t for these islands, who knows how the oceans would get along. One of the early Russian priests assigned to the Aleutian Islands called them the Cradle of Storms and the Birthplace of the Wind. It’s a middlin world. Not a place you can be too sure of. Not a place of black and white. It’s gray through and through.

The Aleuts say, “This is the land that we belong to, not the land that belongs to us.” The Aleuts and the Aleutians are one thing. This is hard for me to get hold of. Maybe some of us get it, farmers perhaps feel some identity with the land they work. But I doubt they
are
the land like the Aleuts. And being here, you get a hint of how this land not only possesses people, but makes them one with it. It’s not like regular land. It’s got a personality, more complex and actualized than most people. I’ve heard people talk about New York or Paris this way. But those are places created by people. They aren’t places on their own. Manhattan would not be Manhattan without the people and their constructs. But the Aleutians—the Aleutians are the Aleutians no matter who’s there. Observation, participation not required.

I turned the bike off the road onto a slender path between two hills. I stopped where the three-wheelers had just a week earlier. I realized as I killed the engine that I was still stalking the old Aleut women, regardless of their failure to leave bathroom messages all over town. I al
most didn’t go. In the hard silence after shutting off the motor, I was suddenly scared and I couldn’t say why. But I also felt that if I didn’t go, I would always wonder, always regret.

I’d only seen them head off in a general direction, and it took a few minutes to pick up the faint trail that cut through the low brush, giving way to the springy tundra as it climbed. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but the sun was mostly out and I felt expectant and full of purpose.

I walked for maybe two hours. The trail, more of a slight depression in the tundra, wound along the back sides of mountains that fronted the ocean. Sometimes it curved along near the top, and I would cut off to get a view. Often a pillbox overlooked the curling ocean, a lonely concrete cap slightly lighter than the rocks. Other times the trail stayed lower, traversing the middle. I must have rounded five such mountains when the path remained straight rather than rolling down again.

I wound around the east side until it gave way to a cliff, stained dark from the ocean’s spray. These mountains were more half-mountains, their back sides rounded, their fronts a wall of stone. But here, at the trail, a narrow shelf continued around the face of the cliff. I stopped to decide just how determined I was. How could four women, one of them older than rock, have managed this shelf in the dark? I was quite sure they hadn’t come this way at all, that they’d cut off somewhere to another destination. Hell, maybe they didn’t even have a destination. Maybe they were just some wacky hiking club that liked the night.

But I couldn’t stop following the trail just because it turned into a few inches of horizontal on a vertical cliff. I checked to see if my sneakers were tied and stepped onto the shelf. For the first few yards, it was narrow. I have big feet, and if I placed my back to the cliff, my toes hit the shelf edge exactly. And that’s how I took that first stretch, sliding my back along the cliff face, shuffling my feet sideways like a toddler on a balance beam.

Waves crashed beneath me, and I could feel the mist they tossed into the air. I was probably terrified, but I was too busy carefully shuffling my large feet to notice. After a few minutes, the shelf widened to three, then four feet. I started walking normally again. Another few minutes and the shelf widened again into the cliff-face equivalent of a
cul-de-sac, a tiny one. Along the cliff wall a jagged crevice opened. It was a cave, but not the nice semicircular opening you think of with caves. This looked like a gigantic zipper opening up the rock.

I ran my hand along the edges. Shit, I thought, I’m going to have to go in there. I delayed with a cigarette, sitting cross-legged on the shelf and watching the waves smash the rocks that knelt at the foot of the cliff below. Although the view was, of course, spectacular, I kept looking behind me at the cave opening. I had this eerie feeling that something was in there, waiting. I puffed like mad because a Marlboro dangling from my lips always makes me feel tougher. Then I had another one because I needed a double dose to battle that creepy feeling. Why the hell was I even doing this?

I knew the answer, at least the first part of it, even then. Something was happening. I could feel it. The way you can feel a storm coming just by the way the air seems to drop around you and the first belches of wind scatter whatever isn’t fastened down. The way dogs bark and open doors suck inward with a bang. Something is coming.

I could feel something new in myself, something that wanted out.

Do you think you can change who you are by changing where you are? You’re supposed to say, “No, of course not. Everyone knows that.” The clichés abound.

You can’t run away from yourself.

Wherever you go, there you are.

If you want to find yourself, go home; you’ll turn up eventually.

Caelam, non animum, mutant qui transmore current.
Those who cross the sea change their place, not themselves.

It’s a lie, perpetuated to keep you looking like you, feeling like you, thinking like you. There are places. And you can find them. Like the gaps in gravity when you’re stoned, these are gaps in conventional wisdom. This knowledge hasn’t been lost. You can still hear the echoes in tales of El Dorado, the Fountain of Youth, Atlantis, Eden. Some part of us still knows there are places that can remake you. You just have to find the right place. And there aren’t many left. They are sinking into vague legend like the river somewhere north of Rome that’s said to turn one’s hair blond if crossed. If there’s a place where brunettes emerge as blondes, you can bet there’s another crossing where a blonde can emerge as something else. This was it.

Of course, you never recognize these places while you’re in them. It’s only after you’ve made it across, made it out, that you can see the change, because it’s only in looking back that you can see what you were.

I stuffed the pack of cigarettes back in my jacket and kept the lighter in my hand, adjusting the flame to high. I moved to the crevice. Holding my lighter in front of me, I stretched my arm into the opening and flicked on the light. Thankfully, I had a burly butane with a two-inch flame.

The cave was larger than I had expected from the opening. The light didn’t reach any of the walls. I’d have to go in. I slid inside, keeping one hand on the edge of the opening. I still couldn’t see anything. I moved farther inside and flicked the lighter again. The flame barely illuminated the left wall, so I moved that way.

As I shuffled closer, I could see the wall wasn’t flat. It was rippled with what looked like old roots, dangling from the dirt and rocks.

But Unalaska had no trees.

I reached out to one, and that’s when I realized what I was looking at.

Bodies.

Or parts of bodies, half buried in the cave walls, reaching out with arms and legs, with the side of a face or a shoulder. The limbs were dry and shriveled but still recognizable. Dried hides wrapped some into tight fetal-like cocoons. Others had broken free, exposing themselves. A scaffold of driftwood supported the bodies like shelves against the sloughing walls of the cave.

The lighter went out when I jerked my arm away. Although I was frantically flicking, it wouldn’t light. Maybe it was the wind shifting through, maybe my hands were shaking too much. I stumbled for the brightness of the cave’s mouth, almost made it. I tripped over a row of bodies, perhaps three, laid along the left inside wall, close together. I touched a foot or hand, I couldn’t tell, as I pushed up and threw myself through the opening.

I was halfway along the shelf when something dry and whispery scattered across my shoulders, inside my collar and down my back.

I ran. Sideways, with my feet threatening to tangle me into the sea.

Even as I skittered along, I knew it was probably just loose dirt
trickling off from above me, but I did not stop until I was back on the hillside. I must have covered that entire length of cliff shelf in thirty seconds.

As soon as I reached the soft grass, I stopped, gasping for breath and sanity. The chain of my necklace had come undone, the ancient bead dropping into my bra. I fished it out and held it tightly in my hand, feeling the hard node press into my palm. With my other hand, I tapped out a cigarette and smoked, facing the cliff, keeping an eye on the trail, just in case. All drugs have their place, their purpose, and let me tell you, there are many, many drugs that are more suited to dealing with mummified bodies, reaching out from cave walls in a cliff side over the Bering Sea, than nicotine. But that’s all I had on me.

No matter how much I smoked that evening I couldn’t find normalcy. I kept seeing those powder-dry arms and legs. I kept hearing Liz puttering around inside. I mixed Baileys with my coffee and sat on my porch, wrapped in a big sweater, and tried to make sense of it. I was fairly sure the Aleut women had gone just where I had gone. They had gone to see the bodies. I went through the possibilities: a séance, a visit with dead relatives, a gruesome game of truth or dare.

I went inside and spread the first Aleutian book on the kitchen table. No index. I started flipping through pages beginning where I’d left off. There it was—“Aleut Mummies.”

I checked the indexes of the other books and found this:

There was more; half of my books had a paragraph or two on Aleutian mummies. I had to read it all several times to understand, but it was fairly simple. Whale hunters, men set apart by their choice of prey, were believed to die young, or escaping death, to become hopelessly psychotic. The mummy flesh itself, called dead-man’s fat, drove these hunters insane eventually. These guys were trying to steal from fate, control the uncontrollable. It worked, but they lost their marbles because of it.

I read more. I read that a few archaeologists did not believe the standard ice age migration theory. That they did not believe the Aleuts were beaten back into these islands by the early arrivals. They did not believe that the Aleuts had come on clumsy feet, plodding after mammoths. No, they had come in boats agile and free, hugging the ice-free shores of that lost land bridge. They had come by choice, pursuing their prey across fog-strewn water to these gray beaches. It was a renegade theory, and I believed it immediately. They had come with intent.

I slammed my index finger inside the book to mark my place and took it with me as I walked to the living room and stood in front of the sketch. My Aleut Mona Lisa. I studied her again. She was hiding something from me; I was sure of it.